You may have seen small budget providers offer free ‘do-it-yourself’ website building software, and it looks so easy you don’t know why you should pass it up. But before you jump into that template software, know what you are actually getting. When you use templates to design your website, your website is usually not consistent. It can appear in different ways on different computer screens and web browsers. In fact, it often looks completely different in the browser that the visitor is using than inside the template program when you created and previewed it.
If the website looks terrible in one popular browser (like Internet Explorer) how does that reflect on your company? Free template-made websites also lack in their user-friendliness. Often they jumble things up, overlap information and shapes, and display certain sections illegibly. In the website we sampled below, we had a hard time even finding a phone number because content overlapped and blocks of information were garbled. A website is no good if your clients (or your staff) can’t even read its content. Beyond user-friendliness, do-it-yourself templates often lack important elements like title tags and meta tags. If they do have them, they are most likely poorly written with default information and not customizable. You will notice page titles like “Home” or “Contact”. These titles are the first thing a search engine reads and should be packed with important keywords and specific descriptions.
You might be thinking that using a free template program and doing it yourself is your only option, because of a small marketing budget. But just consider how much business you might actually lose from frustrated visitors leaving your website, never calling you, and possibly even leaving with a bad impression of your company. Investing a small budget into a professional web design service can be well worth it.
This quick and easy template did not provide this clinic with all it needed. Content is hard to read because it overlaps with other boxes. This site is lacking because it does not have the professional touch to make it stand out. Below, you can see that title tags created by the template program are limited to “Home”. This word does not tell the search engine, or a human being, anything about your company or line of business.
